The mm010 sequence continues executing nominally the daily science record
and playback events. The mm010 sequence runs through January 12.

The initial Mars Polar Lander (MPL) landing site imaging campaign has been completed, with 19
targeted scans across the predicted 1-sigma MPL landing ellipse having been
executed. Unfortunately no obvious signs of the lander or its parachute has
been found at this time. Note that the definition of the landing ellipse
continues to change as additional atmospheric data from
Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) is factored in.
As a result, the current landing site imaging mosaic may not reflect the
latest landing site knowledge. Additionally there were some gaps in the
mosaic due to lost data at the Deep Space Network (DSN) stations. As a result, a second set of
imaging scans is being planned to fill in the gaps and to expand the
coverage area in response to the latest atmospheric data.

In addition to completing the MPL scans, a special targeted opportunity to
image the Mars Pathfinder (MPF) landing site was performed Sunday December 26 at
09:18 UTC. Unfortunately due to an error in the coordinate system used to
derive the targeted attitude, the wrong site was imaged. A second
opportunity to image the Pathfinder landing site occurs on Sunday January 9.
The mz034 mini-sequence will be built on January 6 and 7 to perform the MPF
and additional MPL landing site imaging, and will execute through January
12.

The spacecraft has behaved almost flawlessly in performing all of the
imaging scans.

High Gain Antenna (HGA) Anomaly:

The HGA inner gimbal angle continues to decrease and is currently at 53.5
degrees. The inner gimbal angle will continue decreasing, reaching the
location of the gimbal obstruction at 41.5 deg in early February.
Spacecraft Test Laboratory (STL)
testing begun for validation of the HGA beta supplement operations plan,
which will be used to perform mapping operations for the rest of the nominal
mapping mission.

Spacecraft Health:

All subsystems are reporting nominal health. As reported previously, battery
2 switched from VT curve 2 to VT curve 1 as a result of performing the MPL
scans. This was expected and resulted in slightly higher battery 2
temperatures. Upon completion of the initial MPL and MPF scans, the Battery
2 VT curve was switched back to VT2. Soon after though the flight software
autonomously re-commanded battery 2 back to VT1, which is where we will
leave it. The trend indicates that battery 1 will shortly switch to VT1 as
well.

Uplinks:

There have been 42 uplinks to the spacecraft during the last two weeks,
including new star catalogs and ephemeris files and instrument command
loads. Total command files radiated to the spacecraft since launch is 4300.

Upcoming Events:

1) The mm011 sequence is currently in development and is scheduled for
uplink Monday January 10, with a sequence start time of January 13 00:00
UTC.

2) The mz034 sequence to continue imaging the MPL and MPF landing sites is
scheduled for development on January 6 and 7, to begin execution on Sunday
January 9.